Ani Phyo is bringing her raw food vision to Phuket at the end of January with a class at Mom Tri’s Villa Royale.

The Old Phuket Foundation will hold its fourth Local Life Festival on December 27, with Thalang Rd and Soi Romanee lit up, live music and huge amounts of local food and drinks. Admission is free.

Lin and Miguel Kirjon have revived Gitano – fresh, brightly artistic, playful, sexy, sassy and fun, with great food, great Mojitos and a lot more.

For a fine view across Phuket City to Chalong Bay, accompanied by excellent Thai food and good cold beer, head up Rang Hill in the middle of the city and drop in at the Phuket View restaurant.

Bang Rong Community restaurant with its excellent, cheap, halal food.

It’s called kway tio, and you’ll find it served up by the roadside and in food halls everywhere in Thailand. Look out for places that have a small glass box standing on the counter containing a variety of noodles, typically the triad of thin rice noodles (sen mee khao), wide, flat noodles (sen yai) and yellow egg wheat noodles (ba mee).

Think coffee. If you’re American, that’s probably Starbucks (they’re here on Phuket). If you’re European, then you’ll probably be looking for the Illy logo. What you may not realise is that Thailand has been growing coffee for ages. In Southeast Asia, only Vietnam and Indonesia produce more.

For the baristas among you, Arabica beans are grown in the highlands of northern Thailand while farmers in the hotter lowlands of the coastal provinces along the western edge of the Gulf of Siam produce Robusta beans.

Go back 300 hundred years or so, and most of the people living on Phuket were Muslims of Malay extraction. Even today, about 30 percent of the island’s population are Sunni Muslim, and preserve Islamic traditions.

These traditions are celebrated annually in the Hilal Town Halal Food Festival, this year at Saphan Hin (on the southeast edge of Phuket Town) from April 30 to May 3.

Who could resist a snack with a name like “toop-tap”? We certainly can’t. This simple Thai snack is made from sugar and peanuts in equal proportions with a little clear syrup added, pounded in a mortar, then rolled flat. The flattened sheet of delicious goo is then rolled up and cut into bite-size chunks, each of which is wrapped in thin greaseproof paper.